Part 15 (1/2)
3. To provide teachers who combine ability to teach, with technical skill.
4. To insure, through joint boards on which both employers and workmen are represented, even if these boards are generally advisory, only an interlocking of the technical cla.s.s and the factory, without which any system of vocational instruction must fall down.[A]
[Footnote A: As to how far this is the case, there is a difference of opinion among authorities. Professor F.W. Roman, who has made so exhaustive a comparative study of vocational training in the United States and Germany, writes: ”In Germany, there is very little local control of schools, or anything else. The authority in all lines is highly centralized.” (The Industrial and Commercial Schools of the United States and Germany, 1915, p. 324.) Dr. Kerchensteiner is quoted by the Commercial Club of Chicago as saying, in a letter to Mr. Edwin G. Cooley, that the separate administrative school-boards of Munich form an essential part of the city's school-system.]
5. To maintain a system which shall reach that vast bulk of the population, who, because they need technical training most urgently, are usually the last to receive it.
Many of the most advanced educators in this country join issue with the usual German practice on some most important points. These consider that it is not sufficient that there be a close interlocking of the technical school and cla.s.s and the factory. It is equally essential that vocational education, supported by public funds, shall be an integral part of the public-school system, of which it is indeed but a normal development, and therefore that we must have a unit and not a dual system. Only thus can we insure that vocational education will remain education at all and not just provide a training-school for docile labor as an annex and a convenient entrance hall to the factory system. Only thus can we insure democracy in the control of this new branch of public activity. Only thus can the primary schools be kept in touch with the advanced cla.s.ses, so that the teacher, from the very kindergarten up, may feel that she is a part of a complete whole. Then indeed will all teachers begin to echo the cry of one whom I heard say: ”You ask us to fit the children for the industries. Let us see if the industries are fit for the children.”
Another point in which we must somewhat modify any European model is in the limited training provided for girls. A country which is frankly coeducational in its public schools, state universities and professional colleges, must continue to be so when installing a new educational department to meet the changed and changing conditions of our time.
The parliament of organized labor in the United States has taken a liberal view and laid down an advanced program on the subject of vocational training. In 1908 the American Federation of Labor appointed a committee on industrial education consisting of nineteen members, of whom two were women, Agnes Nestor, International Secretary of the Glove Workers' Union, and Mrs. Raymond Robins, President of the National Women's Trade Union League of America. Its very first report, made in 1909, recommended that the Federation should request the United States Department of Commerce and Labor to investigate the subject of industrial education in this country and abroad.
The report of the American Federation of Labor itself, includes a digest of the United States Bureau of Labor's report, and was published as Senate Doc.u.ment No. 936. It is called ”The Report of the Committee on Industrial Education of the American Federation of Labor, compiled and edited by Charles H. Winslow.”
Whatever narrowness and inconsistency individual trade unionists may be charged with regarding industrial education, the leaders of the labor movement give it their endors.e.m.e.nt in the clearest terms. For instance, this very report, comments those international unions which have already established supplemental trade courses, such as the Typographical Union, the Printing Pressmen's Union, and the Photo Engravers' Union, and other local efforts, such as the School for Carpenters and Bricklayers in Chicago and the School for Carriage, Wagon, and Automobile Workers of New York City. All trade unions which have not adopted a scheme of technical education are advised to take the matter up.
On the question of public-school training, the American Federation of Labor is no less explicit and emphatic, favoring the establishment of schools in connection with the public-school system in which pupils between fourteen and sixteen may be taught the principles of the trades, with local advisory boards, on which both employers and organized labor should have seats. But by far the most fundamental proposal is the following. After outlining the general instruction on accepted lines, they proceed as follows:
”The shop instruction for particular trades, and for each trade represented, the drawing, mathematics, mechanics, physical and biological science applicable to the trade, the history of that trade, and a sound system of economics, including and emphasizing the philosophy of collective bargaining.”
The general introduction of such a plan of training would mean that the young worker would start out on his wage-earning career with an intelligent understanding of the modern world, and of his relations to his employer and to his fellow-laborers, instead of, as at present, setting forth with no knowledge of the world he is entering, and moreover, with his mind clogged with a number of utterly out-of-date ideas, as to his individual power of control over wages and working conditions.[A]
[Footnote A: History, as it is usually taught, is not considered from the industrial viewpoint, nor in the giving of a history lesson are there inferences drawn from it that would throw light upon the practical problems that are with us today, or that are fast advancing to meet us. When a teacher gives a lesson on the history of the United States, there is great stress laid upon the part played by individual effort. All through personal achievements are emphasized. The instructor ends here, on the high note that personal exertion is the supreme factor of success in life, failing unfortunately to point out how circ.u.mstances have changed, and that even personal effort may have to take other directions. Of the boys and girls in the schools of the United States today between nine and fourteen years of age, over eight millions in 1910, how many will leave school knowing the important facts that land is no longer free, and that the tools of industry are no more, as they once were, at the disposal of the most willing-worker? And that therefore (Oh, most important therefore!) the workers must work in cooperation if they are to retain the rights of the human being, and the status signified by that proud name, an American citizen.]
If we wish to know the special demands of working-women there is no way so certain as to consult the organized women. They alone are at liberty to express their views, while the education they have had in their unions in handling questions vital to their interests as wage-earners, and as leaders of other women gives clearness and definiteness to the expression of those views.
If organized women can best represent the wage-earners of their s.e.x, we can gain the best collective statement of their wishes through them. At the last convention of the National Women's Trade Union League in June, 1913, the subject of industrial education received very close attention. The importance of continuation schools after wage-earning days have commenced was not overlooked. An abstract of the discussion and the chief resolutions can be found in the issue of _Life and Labor_ for August, 1913.
After endorsing the position taken up by the American Federation of Labor, the women went on to urge educational authorities to arm the children, while yet at school, with a knowledge of the state and federal laws enacted for their protection, and asked also ”that such a course shall be of a nature to equip the boy and girl with a full sense of his or her responsibility for seeing that the laws are enforced,” the reason being that the yearly influx of young boys and girls into the industrial world in entire ignorance of their own state laws is one of the most menacing facts we have to face, as their ignorance and inexperience make exploitation easy, and weaken the force of such protective legislation as we have.
Yet another suggestion was that ”no working certificates be issued to a boy or girl unless he or she has pa.s.sed a satisfactory examination in the laws which have been enacted by the state for their protection.”
In making these claims, organized working-women are keeping themselves well in line with the splendid statement of principles enunciated by that great educator, John Dewey:
The ethical responsibility of the school on the social side must be interpreted in the broadest and freest spirit; it is equivalent to that training of the child which will give him such possession of himself that he may take charge of himself; may not only adapt himself to the changes that are going on, but have power to shape and direct them.
When we ask for coeducation on vocational lines, the question is sure to come up: For how long is a girl likely to use her training in a wage-earning occupation? It is continually a.s.serted and a.s.sumed she will on the average remain in industry but a few years. The mature woman as a wage-earner, say the woman over twenty-five, we have been pleased to term and to treat as an exception which may be ignored in great general plans. Especially has this been so in laying out schemes for vocational training, and we find the girl being ignored, not only on the usual ground that she is a girl, but for the additional, and not-to-be-questioned reason that it will not pay to give her instruction in any variety of skilled trades, because she will be but a short time in any occupation of the sort. Hence this serves to increase the already undue emphasis placed upon domestic training as all that a girl needs, and all that her parents or the community ought to expect her to have. This is only one of the many cases when we try to solve our new problems by reasoning based upon conditions that have pa.s.sed or that are pa.s.sing away.
In this connection some startling facts have been brought forward by Dr. Leonard P. Ayres in the investigations conducted by him for the Russell Sage Foundation. He tried to find the ages of all the women who are following seven selected occupations in cities of the United States of over 50,000 population. The occupations chosen were those in which the number of women workers exceeds one for every thousand of the population. The number of women covered was 857,743, and is just half of all the women engaged in gainful employment in those cities.
The seven occupations listed are housekeeper, nursemaid, laundress, saleswoman, teacher, dressmaker and servant. No less than forty-four per cent. of the housekeepers are between twenty-five and forty-four.
Of dressmakers there are fifty-one per cent. between these two ages; of teachers fifty-eight per cent.; of laundresses forty-nine per cent., while the one occupation of which a little more than half are under twenty-five years is that of saleswoman, and even here there are barely sixty-one per cent., leaving the still considerable proportion of thirty-nine per cent. of saleswomen over the age of twenty-five.
It is pretty certain that these mature women have given more than the favorite seven years to their trade. It is to be regretted that the investigation was not made on lines which would have included some of the factory occupations. It is difficult to see why it did not. Under any broad cla.s.sification there must be more garment-workers, for instance, in New York or Chicago, than there are teachers. However, we have reason to be grateful for the fine piece of work which Dr. Ayres has done here.
The _Survey_, in an editorial, also quotes in refutation of the seven-year theory, the findings of the commission which inquired into the pay of teachers in New York. The commissioners found that forty-four per cent. of the women teachers in the public schools had been in the service for ten years or more, and that only twenty-five per cent. of the men teachers had served as long a term.
It can hardly be doubted that the tendency is towards the lengthening of the wage-earning life of the working-woman. A number of factors affect the situation, about most of which we have as yet little definite information. There is first, the gradual pa.s.sing of the household industries out of the home. Those women, for whom the opportunity to be thus employed no longer is open, tend to take up or to remain longer in wage-earning occupations.